25 years ago I thought about the subject of violence against women as part of the last stretch of an older reflection on the structure of gender or patriarchywhich begins with field work among members of an Afro-Brazilian religion for my doctoral thesis defended in 1984 with a long chapter on the subject. The racial question and the world of Afro-descendants They have crossed paths from day one, therefore, with my approach to the subject at hand. However, audiences in our continent are much more prone to interest in violence against women and much less interested in the issue of racial discrimination and racism. (…)
it’s in my book “The elemental structures of violence” where I propose to understand violence against women as the result of the intersection of two axes and of a symbolic economy that flows along the intersection of them. This symbolic economy links, on the one hand, an axis that is the relationship between the aggressor and the victimized, where the aggressor embodies the moral pole of the circuit. His morality is a very archaic condition in the collective imagination that reissues a mythical structure present on all continents: the Adamic myth. What are you talking about the adamic myth, which has replicas in Africa, in New Guinea, in the Oceanic world, in the Amerindian world? It speaks of indiscipline, disobedience, contempt, a crime or sin of the founding woman, and her discipline as an initial moment in the history of a people.
Thus, the seizure of power by men through the disciplining of women is narrated, and the construction, from there, of the two positions: the feminine and the masculine. There is today a debate within the decolonial feminisms: one of his positions affirms the non-existence of a patriarchy in the pre-colonial period, that is, before the conquest and colonization. However, the extraordinary planetary dispersion of this mythical origin motif speaks of the archaic and foundational character of female subordination to the father’s law as the initial step that leads to human history, in the version of various peoples. That mythical structure of the feminine error and its discipline is recreated, replicated, reissued in each violation. The rapist is that patriarchal subject that is going to punish and put the woman in her place, and rape is an act that traps the woman in her body as a sign of an inescapable position, of a subjugated destiny.
This is the moralizing, disciplining act of the rapist towards the raped woman who, by being reduced to her body, loses the condition of a person in its ontological fullness – she will be a partial person, diminished in her humanity and incapable of embodying the position of representative of the law-. Rape is not the effect of a particular culture. The violation is evidence of the continuity and exacerbation of an archaic political order: patriarchy. This myth in its variants comes to tell us that it is the most archaic political order of all, the one that founds the first form of oppression and expropriation of value: the oppression and expropriation of the feminine position by the masculine.
During a long period of humanity until colonial times, in the communal order, these were and continue to be two positions, but not necessarily two bodies: the positions emanating from the sexual division of labor, roles and affections, and from the two intertwined stories such as the masculine and the feminine, not necessarily cast and determined by a type of body. That entrapment by the body is definitely conquistual-colonial. It can then be said that, like race, the conquest and colonization They attribute a “nature” and, later, a biology to the dominated position. There is no race before the historical moment of the conquest because race is the attribution of a nature – later a biology – differentiated and inferior to the position of the defeated.
It occurs, therefore, from the entrapment of an anatomy, of a phenotype, in the quality of a sign of a position in history. In the same way, in the process of conquest and colonization, the feminine position is also trapped by the signifier-body, to be misleadingly perceived more as a nature than as a position in history. These two processes, that of the “sexualization” of the gender position and that of racialization, thus reveal themselves to be structurally analogous and contemporary. The process of colonization entails the imposition of monotheisms on the non-monotheistic cosmos of the indigenous world and the path towards colonial-modernity, with its transition to the binary structure of anomalyization, minorization and marginalization of differences from a center that it expels its others to the condition of residual minorities in relation to the Universal Subject. As I’ve said, dual and binary represent two dramatically different structures.
The binary structure unfolds into a great variety of binarisms in which the second term becomes a function – and also an invention – of the first: developed/underdeveloped, white/non-white, modern/primitive, civilized/barbarian, white /non-white, universal subject (Man)/minorities. While the pre-colonial world is dual, the colonial/modern world is binary, and binaryism is the world of the One with its Others – the woman thus mutates into the other of the man, the black into the other of the white, homoerotic sexuality in the other of heterosexuality, etc–. In this order, only one term is ontologically complete, and its others are defective. The man with a small letter, one among others, partiality, of the communal world becomes the Man with a capital letter of modern humanism and begins to embody, to encompass, to hijack all speech and action that are intended to be political, he begins to iconize, with his body , the entire universe of politics. We are facing the invention of minorities. Faced with the invention of minorityization.
Racialization and genderization stop being differences in a hierarchical order to be remains, margins of one. The law will generate palliatives and remedies for this residualization of all those anomalies of the universal subject. And that is an effect of modernity, of modern humanism. We say humanism, but in reality there was possibly no more inhuman stage in the history of humanity. It is a stage where a universal subject is produced, but in reality in the collective imagination it has a face, it has a body.
A man with a small letter becomes a Man with a capital letter, as a synonym for humanity, and his others will appear and all the differences will become anomalies of that full universal subject. We thus enter the fateful period, which is marching in a fateful direction, which is colonial-modernity. We cannot clearly perceive its ominous nature because our vision is clouded by negative prejudices regarding communal life, as well as positive prejudices regarding citizenship. Both are prejudiced views, informed by false beliefs. The institutional fiction, the citizen myth, has been shown to be an unattainable construction for the majorities in Latin America.
This text is a fragment of the article “Refound feminism to refound politics”, from the book “Scenes of an uncomfortable thought” (Prometheus).
by Rita Segato
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